Status Updates From Venomous Lumpsucker

this doesn’t feel as unrealistic as i’d like it to. can we please stop destroying our planet and destroy ai instead

Also liked chapter 12s discussion on extinction at the end of

This whole end of chapter 7 with the philosophical and moral stream of consciousness since end of 116 was so good. A mix of logic and stories and anger and contradictory feelings that I relate to and had thought about before and reading this feels like it was put down in words better than I've thought about it before.

Okay the wasp digression just ended and I loved the whole thing and I want to talk to this author. It is making me think more about how insane and incredible animals are and how profound extinction honestly is and I want to think more and excited to see how much deeper this book dives into it.

I really liked a paragraph on page 46 about animals finding best solutions to problems and the commentary of the parasite wasp on page 113. So far the story and world building and digressions on cool animals is gripping me more than the character development but still enjoying it 1/3 in

I did positive judge this book by its cover and title when I stole it at a white elephant. I like fish and the colors of the cover and it sounded cool and the person who gifted it really liked it. I'm enjoying it so far. I find animals and extinction really fascinating and it's cool to see how that might play out in a potential near future.

some books are written assuming their audience is less than intelligent, some are written not caring about what their audience thinks at all and are just conveyors of the genius their author believes they possess, and some are written for an audience who is seemingly seen as neither overly dumb nor overly intelligent but, regardless, doesn’t need all this damn detail; this book falls into the latter

I’m so enjoying all the details and thoughtfulness that’s gone into the world building that’s so eerily familiar. Like the extinction credit hack with COX region manipulation to feign new species in assessments (and then using the money for conservation as a way of having the free market work in your favor). Genius!

Was worried that I was going to hate the narrator based on the description of the book but gave it a shot because the concept seemed interesting and so far so good!!! It’s dark humor not too preachy

The pain of having to translate something almost sacred into a language that was never built to hold it. Like taking a living, breathing species, with all its quiet complexity and the impossible evolutionary history, its very right to just exist, and compress it into numbers on a balance sheet, hoping that will make someone care.

“The biodiversity enthusiasts were trying to talk to capitalists in the language of capitalism, but they knew as well as the capitalists did that it just wasn’t a strong pitch.”

The way mine and (& every other biologist I’ve met) can feel their soul leave the body every time we’re made to reduce a species to just a monetary value.